Advice to aspiring authors generally includes the exhortation to develop a thick skin, to serve as a shield at numerous points during the writer’s career: finding an agent, finding a publisher, dealing with multiple editors’ notes and queries, absorbing churlish reviews, parrying readers’ complaints and deflecting the idiocies of prize juries. It is good advice. But is there a skin that could possibly have protected the nascent novelist from this note?

“I honestly don’t think it is a publishable proposition … [it] doesn’t really begin to be a novel … I think publishers would also object to there being no chapter divisions, the multitude of mis-spellings, and the fact that a great many words can only exist in your own imagination. Thinking about it dispassionately, and forgetting that we are friends, I cannot help feeling that the book doesn’t have much to say at all. My greatest quarrel, however, is with the quality of the writing, which lacks the imagery and force necessary to lift it out of the rut.”

Forgetting that we are friends, I cannot help feeling that the book doesn’t have much to say at all

Nina Froud, literary agent

As the joke goes: but what do you really think?

The recipient of this billet-doux, from literary agent Nina Froud, was Beryl Bainbridge, who had shown her the manuscript of A Weekend with Claud, her first published novel (Harriet Said …, an earlier attempt, was published third), in April 1964. It is quoted in Brendan King’s recent biography of Bainbridge, subtitled Love by All Sorts of Means, one of a number of recent reassessments of the lives of female novelists who have not had their proper due. In his portrayal of the decade or so that preceded the start of Bainbridge’s career as a novelist, King chronicles a period of turbulence – her numerous romantic relationships, which included a passionately chaste one that saw her dash to Paris with a man 35 years her senior for whom she and a schoolfriend had fashioned a fantasy identity; marriage and separation; the birth of two children in successive years, with a third to follow later; a part in Coronation Street that became an interview staple for the rest of her life; and two abortive suicide attempts.

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And often, of course, there was the sense of fitting in around the edges of men’s lives, waiting for a turn, for the light to shine on her. King recounts an extraordinary episode in which a friendly neighbour – an architect who was doing business with Bainbridge’s husband, Austin Davies – advised the couple on a solution to their marital problems: Austin, the neighbour believed, must adopt a far more discreet approach to his infidelities, and certainly return home at least once or twice a week; Beryl, meanwhile, should up her game on the home front, providing delicious meals, well-behaved children and a spotless interior. On the plus side, she would not be expected to sleep with Austin. In fairness to Bainbridge’s husband, King reports that both spouses were “stunned” by the proposal. Beryl, though, ignoring all else, cut to the heart of the matter: in that scenario, what would she do for sex? Horrified by the idea that women should concern themselves with such base matters, the hapless agony uncle skedaddled.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the marriage did not weather the storm. Within a few years, Bainbridge had embarked on a relationship with the novelist Alan Sharp, whose work was spoken of in the same breath as that of Joyce and Lawrence; Sharp had effected the introduction to Froud. It was, Bainbridge conceded, “a little depressing” to live with someone so successful, as she herself was trying to write, especially one who never appeared to make much effort at his work. What could she do, but “fight huge endless battles with myself on the Heath and weep when he’s out”?

Beryl Bainbridge with her children in Camden, London, in 1968. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

In due course, Sharp emigrated to the US and built a career as a screenwriter. Bainbridge went on to publish 19 novels (20, if you double-count A Weekend with Claud, which first appeared in 1967, and a substantially revised edition, now retitled A Weekendwith Claude, from 1981), as well as non-fiction, short stories and journalism. She was, famously, the most prolific of all Booker bridesmaids, finding herself shortlisted five times, and with never a win until, a year after her death in 2010, Man Booker launched its “Best of Beryl” award, to be decided by public vote. (The winner was Master Georgie, Bainbridge’s Crimean odyssey, which had been edged out in 1998 by Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam.)

The mercurial author’s likely reaction to her posthumous gong is as hard to second-guess as she was, although her daughter Jojo Davies remarked at the time that her mother had very much wanted to win the prize “despite her protests to the contrary”. It is also difficult to know whether that “contrary” denotes a character trait – unconventional, humorously rueful, outsiderish – or a more familiarly gendered diffidence born of a low expectation of recognition and reward.

Such pragmatism extended far beyond Bainbridge. Another of this year’s subjects for biography was Angela Carter, brought spiritedly to life by Edmund Gordon, who cites an interview she gave in the 1980s, in which she complained about the “old boys’ club”. This collective might happily list Malcolm Bradbury and Kingsley Amis as the most important British contemporary writers, while at the same time omitting Doris Lessing, “the only one with a really huge international reputation”. Another omission, she pointed out, was Bainbridge; and then, as Gordon notes, she “trailed off before saying that they also left out Angela Carter”.

Carter was immensely admiring and supportive of many of her peers, including Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, both of whom spoke to Gordon in the course of his research: Rushdie paid tribute to her generosity, while also suggesting that he thought “she did genuinely wish that people treated her work as more important”; Ishiguro felt that while she had confidence in her writing, she was also resigned to never being well known. Shortly before her death in 1992, Wise Childrenwas overlooked for that year’s Booker shortlist, with the complete absence of any novels by women the first prompt for the eventual instigation of the female-only Orange prize for fiction. When Carter died, Lorna Sage wrote an obituary essay for her in Granta’s Biography issue. It was titled “The Death of the Author”, and reported that Carter’s response to missing out on the big prizes while terminally ill was characteristically caustic: “I certainly don’t get the sympathy vote,” she said.

Unlike Bainbridge, who had taken a mazy path to writing, and also suffered bouts of writer’s block, Carter settled on writing relatively early in her life, and thereafter words and ideas seemed to pour from her. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was plucked from the slush pile by an editor who found every sentence “remarkable”. Although subsequent books and other writing projects occasionally hit setbacks – her work of cultural criticism, The Sadeian Woman, didn’t have the smoothest gestation – Ishiguro’s sense of her writerly confidence seems accurate. Why, then, was she able to even tolerate the idea of the wider world not taking her work as seriously as she believed it ought? And why was Bainbridge so apparently sanguine about sitting through ceremony after ceremony?

Anita Brookner won the Booker prize in 1984, with
Hotel du Lac. Photograph: Times Newspapers/Rex/Shutterstock

The female writers whose work has most recently come in for enthusiastic appraisal are by no means a homogeneous group; their influences, preoccupations and style vary wildly. Their careers often encompass more than one movement: contrast Bainbridge’s semi-autobiographical early work – all unhappy marriages, escapes from oppressive homes and love affairs with rogues – with her later audacious co-option of historical figures such as Samuel Johnson and Scott’s Antarctic explorers. A trademark oddness – the strange mixture of lightness and menace, the glancing tone that convinced Froud that Bainbridge had nothing to say, the obsession with brittle cruelty – can be seen in both kinds of novel, but also speaks to something unnervingly fugitive in her work.

Reputations can founder in the face of that type of aesthetic indeterminacy; but it might be said that when you are a woman, you encounter the additional problem of the rest of your life. Bainbridge’s persona – racy, bohemian, hard-smoking, hard-drinking, chaotic and complete with a stuffed bison in her Camden hallway – inflected her work. Carter’s sojourn in Japan, her intense interest in fairytales and in female eroticism, similarly merged into the figure of the woman with wild grey hair and a gaze that was both penetrating and dreamily detached.

The (mainly male) press decided to pigeonhole her as a lonely spinster who consoled herself by writing novels

Julian Barnes on Anita Brookner

But if there is something daunting about the suggestion of a female writer’s appetites – not only for making work, but also for sex, for drink, for travel – there is something just as unsettling about their presumed absence. Anita Brookner’s impeccably ironed and precisely buttoned blouses, her sculpted hair and serious, steady face, combined with her victory in 1984’s Booker prize (and perhaps particularly over JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun) with Hotel du Lac to create a settled image of her early on in her life as a novelist. When she died in March of this year, at the age of 87, Julian Barnes wrote a pitch-perfect, deeply evocative appreciation of her, in which he described the firmly policed barriers that she placed between herself and the outside world, typified by her brief tours of duty at publishing parties, the asceticism that accompanied her enjoyment of food, drink, socialising. Partly this was personal preference, and partly to do with the fact that she had already enjoyed a “real” and much-loved career in teaching; writing novels, she told an interviewer a few years before her death, was “really just filling the time”.

And yet her self-possession and self-containment were misperceived, as Barnes noted: “The (mainly male) press dubbed her ‘Modest Anita’ and – ignoring her stellar career as an art historian – decided to pigeonhole her as a lonely spinster whose life had not worked out and who therefore consoled herself by writing novels, once a year, as a regular act of comfort, like a posh version of buying herself a box of Quality Street.”

In terms of the literature she left us, how newspaper reports characterised Brookner is largely irrelevant; it’s only really significant if it allows us to underestimate her work. Hotel du Lac, for example, can be inaccurately summarised as the story of a woman who, disappointed in love, goes on a classy but unadventurous foreign holiday, is disappointed once again, and comes home; often her novels are spoken of as if they are essentially small-scale studies in the acceptance of failure. And yet their moral reach was so much greater than that, as Barnes points out: “She knew the world to be unfair, and thought it naive of anyone else not to see that.” There is no much larger topic than that.

Female writers have long been accustomed to the way in which their work is described as domestic, which their male counterparts would never be; women seem to have to work much harder to earn such adjectives as “panoramic”. But the way in which their lives and their work are seen to interact is even more insidious, not least because confusion over familial, sexual and social roles and a sense of the struggle towards identity are often part of their subject material. To capture that level of unsettling complexity requires subtlety and subversion on the part of the artist; much easier, then, for onlookers to elide the work and the life and thereby create a more easily apprehended caricature of both.

A BBC production of
The Cazalets, from 2001. Photograph: Laurie Sparham/BBC

A form of that reductiveness surrounded Elizabeth Jane Howard, whose Cazalet chronicles have undergone numerous ups and downs on the literary stock market. At the moment, perhaps as a result of persistent undervaluing, they are riding high. At other times, her intricate story of the fortunes and dispositions of an upper-middle-class family has been perceived variously as a posh comfort read, a highbrow soap opera, or a guilty pleasure well written enough for you not to have to feel too guilty. But the fact that they describe a teetering world of rigid class boundaries and vanishing deference is often mistaken for a tacit endorsement. Hilary Mantel, writing about Howard earlier in the year, summarised the situation thus: “Why should I care, some readers ask, about the trials of the affluent? But readers who do not care about rich characters do not care about poor ones either. Howard’s novels can be resisted by those who see the surface and find it bourgeois. They can be resisted by those who do not like food, or cats, or children, or ghosts, or the pleasures of pinpoint accuracy in observation of the natural or manufactured world … But they are valued by those open to their charm, their intelligence and their humour, who can listen to messages from a world with different values from ours.”

Artemis Cooper’s biography of Howard, which was also published this year, asserts the importance of Howard the writer, but also paints a painful portrait of a woman whose emotional life was often determined by the approval and attention of men – most notably, of course, that of her husband of 18 years, Kingsley Amis. It is a life that fits uncomfortably with our view of a writer’s need, or even obligation, to place their work above all else; but it also illuminates the different standard to which men and women are held, and the different labels that are attached to them. How easily we fall into the trap of seeing female writers as either iconoclastically breaking free from gender roles, or damagingly swamped by them.

Molly Keane’s
Good Behaviour was published when she was in her 70s. Photograph: Virago

In her series of memoir pieces for the London Review of Books, which morphed into the book In Gratitude, published just before her death in April, Jenny Diski reflects on the trouble that labels and titles can give a person. She was writing about Doris Lessing, who took her in to her home when Diski was 15. By the time of Lessing’s death, Diski wrote, “I’d known Doris for 50 years. In all that time, I’ve never managed to figure out a designation for her that properly and succinctly describes her role in my life, let alone my role in hers.” Doris, she observed, was not her mother, adoptive or otherwise; her parents were not only still alive but “regrettably” still in contact with her. She was not an auntie, nor even a longstanding family friend; in fact, when Diski moved in, as a result of knowing Lessing’s son, they didn’t know one another at all. And yet, “For some reason, being precise, finding a simple possessive phrase that covered my situation, was very important.” Diski’s subsequent work – novels, stories, memoir, travelogue that are all strikingly resistant to neat description – reflects that insistent preoccupation with naming, and with boundaries; between herself and other people, between wellness and madness, between internal and external landscapes.

There are more biographies on the way. Next year Sally Phipps’s biography of her mother, the Irish author Molly Keane, will describe how she wrote novels and plays under the pseudonym MJ Farrell throughout her life, only to publish her best-known work, Good Behaviour, under her own name when she was in her 70s. It’s a nice link to another pseudonymous writer, Anne Brontë, whose life is uncovered by Samantha Ellis in the forthcoming book Take Courage. In it, Ellis argues that we have allowed the greater celebrity of Anne’s sisters, Charlotte and Emily, to overshadow her achievements and her talent. It is our loss, argues Ellis; and the same may be said for many other writers whom we have allowed to be sidelined.

But tomorrow is another day. The writers in this piece come from a variety of backgrounds; there are important differences in their class and social identities. Despite barriers to publication, it’s impossible that there are not numerous neglected writers – writers of colour, working-class writers, avant-garde writers – whose work we have yet to fully access. Let us set to it.

If you read only one novel by …

Beryl BainbridgeEvery Man for Himself (1996)Bainbridge excelled at the drama of enclosed spaces, which allowed her to build tension as she manipulated her mysterious, unknowable characters. Chief among them is Morgan, a young American who has just done something awful, and may be about to do more.

Angela CarterNights at the Circus (1984)At this exuberant novel’s heart is Fevvers, the winged woman who transforms into a stunning aerialiste in Colonel Kearney’s circus – and spins a grand yarn throughout a novel that takes us from London to St Petersburg and across Siberia.

Anita BrooknerLook at Me (1983)The novel that immediately preceded Hotel du Lac is a shattering read, a tale of viciousness and heartbreak masked in gentility and social convention. Fanny, an orphan who becomes the plaything of a glamorous married couple, believes her life transformed – until, of course, they tire of her.

Elizabeth Jane HowardThe Long View (1956)Leaving aside the four novels that comprise theCazalet chronicles (with a final coda, All Change, in 2013), Howard’s finest work is The Long View, which anatomises a lengthy marriage that founders in the end. Beginning with a family dinner party, it gradually moves back in time to the Flemings’ first meeting, and a moment before disillusion and boredom had set in.

Jenny DiskiSkating to Antarctica (1997)Diski’s memoir makes a connection between the blankness of a psychiatric institution and that of a whited-out Antarctic landscape; and the originality and potency of that image is what marks the book out. It ranges unsentimentally over Diski’s unstable upbringing and her own difficulty at forging an adult identity with startling clarity.

Molly KeaneGood Behaviour (1981)In a crumbling house in rural Ireland, the St Charles family attempts to keep up appearances; none is more isolated than Aroon, the household’s unbeautiful and unmarried daughter. We have the actor Peggy Ashcroft to thank for the novel’s eventual publication – she was given the manuscript in response to asking for something to read while she was staying with Keane, and realised it should no longer be sitting in a desk drawer.

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